Professor's Rebellion: Teaching Western Books in Iran, and in U.S., Too

By JULIE SALAMON

Published: March 24, 2003

WASHINGTON—
Azar Nafisi, formerly of Tehran, was struggling to wake up her graduate students. Under discussion was Janie, the itinerant mixed-race heroine of ''Their Eyes Were Watching God,'' written in 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston.

''Is she a feminist?'' one student asked.

''Who cares if she is a feminist?'' Ms. Nafisi replied. ''What makes her interesting is her contradictions.'' She prodded the class to connect with Janie, who has returned to her small-town home to tell of her adventures. ''Janie is in a state of inner exile,'' she said. ''Telling the tale is her way of taking control of the life she had lived. It wasn't death she feared. It was misunderstanding.''

Ms. Nafisi's students, at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies here, appeared interested but a little sleepy. Not quite, she said, the level of intensity she was accustomed to when teaching Western literature in Iran, after the Islamic revolution there, in the 1980's and 90's; nothing like the riot that almost broke out when she gave a talk in Iran on Flaubert and ''Madame Bovary'' or the time she decided to put ''The Great Gatsby'' on trial in her classroom at the University of Tehran because her students were so incensed by that novel.

Therein lies Ms. Nafisi's appreciation of contradiction. In Iran she detested the restrictions placed on women, including wearing the veil, and left with her family in 1997. Yet the constraints of a ruling totalitarian theocracy turned banned literature into forbidden fruit and gave teaching undergraduate staples like Jane Austen the panache of leading an underground rebellion.

After quitting her teaching post at the University of Tehran, frustrated by official restrictions, Ms. Nafisi offered a clandestine course in Western classics to students who met in her home. Ms. Nafisi, now 52, has written of her experiences as a professorial partisan in a new book, ''Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,'' to be published this week by Random House.

Before class, discussing the transition from there to here, she invoked an author: in this case Saul Bellow and his notion of ''the sufferings of freedom'' (from ''More Die of Heartbreak''). For Ms. Nafisi this translates into a cultural complacency in the United States that prizes ''Joe Millionaire,'' neglects reading and encourages people to participate in polls without understanding basic issues. She spoke with good-natured distress of her own son, a high school senior, who receives almost all of his information from television.

But it is an ordeal she is happy to withstand. For 18 years Ms. Nafisi lived a bifurcated existence. In her classes she found that her most fervent Islamic students were the most obsessed with Western pop culture, and that everyone was interested in the Oscars. (Since they celebrated Western movies, they were officially forbidden.)

At home she wore lipstick and jeans, and watched ''The Golden Girls'' on the family's secret satellite television. (Purchased on the black market, the satellites would sit on terraces, often hidden by laundry.) Outside she was forced to hide beneath a veil, forbidden to lick an ice cream cone in public. On first arriving in the United States she succumbed to the pleasure of the shopping mall and the lure of ''Law & Order'' and ''Seinfeld'' (and has incorporated ''yada-yada'' into her lilting syntax). Now she can wear lipstick to class and does.

''Wherever you go, you find things you don't like and people with fundamentalist thinking,'' she said. ''But here you have the space to criticize. I can write an article against 'Joe Millionaire' or make fun of it or go watch PBS. It is different here because I feel I have other spaces. You can criticize, you can hope to change.''

In her Hopkins class Ms. Nafisi may have expressed indifference about Janie's feminism, but she is a vocal advocate of women's rights. Born to secular Muslim parents, she saw her grandmother, who was observant, forced under Reza Shah's regime to remove her veil. Though that government, like that of his son, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was authoritarian, women inclined to modernity prospered. These women included Nezhat Nafisi, her mother, who became a member of Iran's Parliament.

''No wonder when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came in, the most important thing for him was to change the women's situation,'' Ms. Nafisi said. ''The men in these countries become very scared when women become conscious.''

She has always lived a dual life. Like many offspring of prosperous Iranians of the era, she studied abroad, in England and Switzerland. She attended the University of Oklahoma, following the young man she married in Iran on his summer vacation. As it would throughout her life, politics played a role. Her father, Ahmad Nafisi, who became mayor of Tehran in 1961, was jailed in 1963 for insubordination, among other charges. Ms. Nafisi got married, she said, out of general confusion. The minute her father was released from prison, in 1968, she filed for divorce. (She has two children with her current husband, Bijan Naderi, an Iranian born civil engineer.

It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the cheery professor with the stylish haircut and pantsuit with the woman who lived in Tehran during eight years of the Iran-Iraq war. ''It was so strange during the war,'' she said. ''As soon as our government would start marching and talk about attacking this nest of imperialist spies, we knew our turn would come. One side would attack; the other would retaliate. There was a bond between us, and the Iraqis because as soon as they were hit, we would expect to be hit.''

Mainly she is frustrated by the way governments of the West have conducted diplomacy in the region. ''People here have been careless about who they support,'' she said. ''The people here thought you can have economic and political relations, but it doesn't matter if their partners are beheading people in their own countries, or stoning women to death.''

She said: ''You need to support the democratic forces, to give them hope and to be stricter toward these horrible governments. I'm talking about Saudi Arabia, I'm talking about Egypt, I'm talking about Iran and of Korea of course. You can't use one evil force against another. That is what happened in the Iraq-Iran war. The U.S. used Iraq against Iran not thinking they are creating a monster, but they did.''

She found a way to refract the present situation through literature. She said she planned to introduce her students to ''My Name Is Red'' by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author. This novel, set in 16th-century Istanbul, is a murder mystery, but the book encompasses the perceptual gulf between East and West. The characters include a group of miniaturists asked by the sultan to work in the European style, with realism and perspective. They are unnerved, to the point of committing murder.

For Ms. Nafisi, the inability of these characters to change their point of view explains why the United States is so hated by Muslim countries. ''Reading that book I realized why in those countries they target culture so much,'' she said. ''It is O.K. with them to have economic relations with the U.S. It is O.K. to have political relations. Where is it not O.K.? In terms of women and in terms of their culture. They're worried that you will come in and change their perspective. That women will look at women in this other part of the world and wonder, 'Why can't I be like that?' ''

She continued: ''The book is very bloody. The characters are so frightened, so destabilized. For me it explains Osama bin Laden. He is not a poor man. What is in danger is his whole way of being. It is in danger because it is being questioned not just by the West but by people in his own country who look at the West. That's why for him this is a life-and-death struggle. Where else can he go? He either has to change or he has to try and kill you.''

For Ms. Nafisi the lessons of literature are not academic. She had not seen her mother, who died recently in Iran, since leaving six years ago, and her father still lives there. ''I'll always have longings wherever I go,'' she said. During the 18 years she lived under Iran's revolutionary regime, she never put up curtains, always ready to flee. Now, Ms. Nafisi said, she often feels a desire simply to see the landscape of her native country. She recalls driving toward the Elborz mountains as a child, dreaming of the world that lay beyond.

Now she has found that world but lost her view of the mountains. She is reminded that life, like literature, serves up painful contradictions. ''If you're born in a place with mountains,'' she said, ''you can never get used to the plains.'' She has hung up curtains, though, just not in every room.

Photos: IN WASHINGTON, Ms. Nafisi at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She sees a cultural complacency in this country that values TV over reading. (Carol T. Powers for The New York Times); IN TEHRAN, Azar Nafisi teaching a literature class at the University of Tehran. A riot almost broke out there when she gave a talk on Flaubert and ''Madame Bovary.''